Elegiac
by Aerecura
Summary: "I like to think that she died fighting, the way she'd have wanted to go, with those eyes of hers narrowed and fire on her lips. Or maybe my name. We never found her body, so there's no way of knowing." Kaidan reflects on the fragments of memories left over from his time with Commander Shepard. T for implied situations and some language.


A/N: This was the result of playing the Extended Cut DLC and (once again) crying so hard tears came out of my nose. Damn you, Bioware, for making me feel all the feels...anyway, this oneshot assumes the Control ending. Thanks, as always, goes to my lovely beta Skeasel.

MAJOR SPOILERS for Mass Effect 3, including some for the EC DLC. Also, all this belongs to Bioware, etc. etc. etc.

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_Tonight I can write the saddest lines._

_To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her._

_To hear the immense night, still more immense without her._

_And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture._

_-Poem Twenty, _Pablo Neruda

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I like to think that she died fighting, the way she'd have wanted to go, with those eyes of hers narrowed and fire on her lips. Or maybe my name. We never found her body, so there's no way of knowing. At the memorial service, we all gathered around an empty coffin. The way it had been three years before, but worse. Putting up that silver plaque, and knowing that this time it was real, she wasn't coming back, was the hardest thing I've ever done. _I can't lose you again, _I told her, but somehow I did.

Somehow I did.

After the service, when everything was still chaos and they were drawing up lists of the dead that went on and on forever, I took the lift up to her quarters. They were just the way she'd left them. The bed was unmade, and there were still datapads with schematics and numbers piled up across her desk, and the last civilian outfit she'd ever worn (soft black pants, boots, a collared blue shirt with buttons down the front) lay scattered on the bathroom floor. It all smelled so much like her that I felt sick. But I took that shirt, and every year, on the anniversary of the day we won the war, I take it out and bury my nose in it. I imagine the way it clung to her skin, when she breathed and walked and smiled.

A year after we lost her, I started to dream of her with a blank and featureless face, the edges of her body rippling like a mirage. It scared the hell out of me. So I made a list of all the things I remembered about her:

1) The apple-and-honey scent of her shampoo

2) Her favorite color (orange)

3) The bump in the line of her nose

4) The scar in her eyebrow where hair didn't grow

5) The way she'd raise her brow and pout when she was losing at poker (often)

6) What she would have named her children: Alice (if girl) or Gareth (if boy)

7) The curve of her bare hip under the sheets

8) The way she bit her nails down to the quick

9) The name of the pink lipstick she sometimes wore on shore leave (_Sakura_)

10) The wine-colored birth mark on her thigh

But it didn't do her justice. How was I supposed to talk about that gray streak in her dark hair, the one she had even though she was only thirty-two? And the way she'd pull her hair into a bun that skewed to the left side of her head just to hide it? And the way I'd kiss the place high on her neck where those gray strands grew?

It happens like that sometimes - although occasionally I feel I can barely hold on to any traces of her, other times it's like she's right beside me. I can be doing anything – on the comm with the Alliance, brushing my hair, looking out the window at so many leveled cityscapes – and I have these flashes of memory so vivid they might as well be happening again. I remember a diplomatic function the month after Saren, and there was classical music in the background with a stately piano and a violin, Vivaldi maybe. We were wearing our bulky Class A service uniforms, not ballgowns or tuxedos like the civilians, but even so she grinned and pulled me out of my seat. She taught me how to waltz that night, _ONE-two-three TWO-two-three THREE-two three, _me with my two left feet and her graceful even in her heavy jacket and medals.

And I can remember the last time we spoke before the final push in London, when I kissed her in front of everyone and her lips tasted like dirt and blood.

She told me that day that she'd always love me. No matter what. But how am I supposed to remember that when she's so much _more_ than what she was? This woman who sacrificed herself to save the galaxy we all fought so hard to put together. Mothers of every species christen their children after her. There are memorial plazas and galas and hospitals built in her name. They even wanted to call the Sol System the Shepard System, for awhile. (She'd have hated that.)

She isn't just mine anymore. She's an idea. An _ideal_.

I've stayed on Earth these five years. I kept my new Spectre status, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. All I had in mind was going home to Vancouver to take the longest leave I could and put myself together for awhile. But I know she would have rolled her green eyes at me and said _Kaidan, _stretching out my name in that way of hers. So I rebuilt with the rest of the survivors.

And you know what the strangest part of it is? The Reapers, the ones that turned around and helped us, they speak with her voice. Hers, except it isn't. She always spoke with that earthy, grounded tone, like she was _of _the earth, just as strong and unshakeable as it was. Now it's amplified, somehow, almost...godlike. At first it burned so bad to hear it. But it's grown comforting, because it means she's in there somewhere. She has to be. Even if I don't know whether she can recognize me yet.

_It is what it is, _I told her our last night together, and I guess I was right.

_Kaidan_, she'd said, almost teary but not, _our story's going to have a happy ending. No matter what. _Her sudden laugh. _I've busted my ass too hard for it not to_.

And she's right too, it does. Even if every time I see a picture of her smiling, my breath catches in my throat, Wrex and Bakara have a brood of young growing up fast on Tuchanka. Tali works alongside the geth on Rannoch and doesn't wear her mask to live. Liara can walk in the park on Thessia where her mother took her when she was young. I can watch the sun go down from the veranda of my parents' new home in Vancouver, though it's without her leaning on my shoulder, or a little boy named Gareth with her green eyes or a little girl named Alice with my brown ones. And every day the ones who knew Shepard wake up and remember that the reason we take each breath is because of her.

I live without her but I do live.

One day I will learn to let that make me happy.

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A/N: If you have anything to say, I'd love to hear it! The review button's right down there...


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